A long-lasting Brentanian and Prague connection, around Ehrenfels, about language

Christian von Ehrenfels published his seminal paper Über Gestaltqualitäten in 1890, six years before becoming a professor of philosophy at the German University in Prague, where he would remain until 1929. He had attended Brentano’s lectures in Vienna (1879–80) and written his dissertation in Graz under the guidance of Meinong (one of Brentano’s most prominent students). Ehrenfels would later become a colleague of another pupil of Brentano (in Brentano’s Würzburg years, i.e. 1867–69), Marty, recruited by the same German University in Prague already in 1880, where he taught until 1913, devoting himself mainly to the philosophy of language.

Thus, we can isolate here a spatiotemporally unified context – Prague at the turn of the twentieth century – which can help us understand how philosophical and psychological queries ‘from an empirical standpoint’ happened to converge on a lively interaction between linguistic and psychic dynamisms.

Further terminological enquiry would help detect promising relationships on a theoretical basis.

The technical expression introduced by Marty to indicate the disproportion between what must be entirely signified and the features that merely hint at that whole is suggestiv: Vorstellungssuggestive, Urteilssuggestive, Emotive.

Again, in Prague, in 1911, the later founder (1926) and president of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Vilém Mathesius, published an article on ellipsis and verbless sentences in English. A deeper understanding of the potentials and limits of these terminological choices would be fostered by examining Bühler’s discussion concerning the couple ‘Form’ vs ‘Gestalt’ in his 1934 Sprachtheorie and in his 1910 review of Marty’s Untersuchungen.

Finally, to better understand topics and arguments concerning the Praguian milieu, lettersinChristian von Ehrenfels: Korrespondenz, contained in the Verzeichnis der in der Forschungsstelle verwahrten Kopien aus dem Ehrenfels-Nachlaß, (R. Fabian), were also taken into account.